Back to square one: El Paso City Council rejects locals-only plan for city manager search

The El Paso City Council once again backed off from advancing its search for a new city manager, leaving the city back at square one for the third time since last year.

Mayor Oscar Leeser proposed a plan to recruit city manager candidates from El Paso County before advancing a nationwide search, which would likely be overseen by an executive search firm at roughly $50,000 to the city. However, council members blasted the plan, and Leeser ultimately removed it from consideration.

"This is a good item," he said after seeing the writing on the wall that he'd be called to cast a tie-breaking vote on the issue. "This is a good thing to go within your own, to pick within the city and stop the brain drain. I believe in the people we have within our organization but, at the end of the day, I don't want it to go in the way it's going in."

"I'm ashamed of a lot of the comments that were made," Leeser added, "but I'm not surprised either."

Most of the City Council expressed concern over the plan, which would have only initiated a nationwide search if a qualified candidate could not be found locally, but none were as vocal as city Reps. Chris Canales and Cassandra Hernandez.

"I think the perception of what's being proposed ... can be very bad," Canales said, asserting that the proposed two-week time frame for the job posting was an "unreasonably short amount of time" and the El Paso-centric candidate pool was "very bad practice."

He likewise called it "disrespectful" to Baker Tilly US, the Chicago-based advisory, tax and assurance firm previously under consideration to head up the city manager search, for the city to advance a locals-only process. The City Council rejected a proposal to hire Baker Tilly last August and again during its Jan. 30 meeting.

Hernandez, meanwhile, took aim at the narrow scope of the plan.

"We should not limit ourselves with the false notion that we only can see internal candidates," she said. "(This option) is not the best practice, it is against every precedent that we have set."

El Paso city Rep. Brian Kennedy was the only council member to voice support for the plan.

"I believe our talent pool here is wide and deep," Kennedy said. "I believe in the employees that work with the city of El Paso. I believe in our department heads. I believe in our deputy city managers and I think we're right to give them the first bite at the apple."

Keeping 'the status quo of corruption'

Public speakers were unanimous in their opposition to Leeser's plan, with Patricia Osmond going so far as to accuse city leadership of "corruption" and "unethical practices."

That accusation sparked a heated exchange between Osmond and Leeser.

"We have already seen the corruption," Osmond said. "So, for any member of the body, anybody suggesting we just stay local ... what you're stating is that you want to keep the status quo of corruption."

Leeser piped up, saying that levying an accusation of corruption against the City Council was "illegal."

"I just wanted to make sure that you just accused everyone of being corrupt," he said, "and you did and it's on video."

But Osmond was far from the only speaker to allege impropriety — perennial public speaker Lisa Turner likewise insinuated that the plan to stay local smacks of corruption.

"I've seen corruption," she said. "This smells of it."

Turner asserted that a city manager hired through Leeser's locals-only process would forever be considered a "back-room hire" through a "sham process to cover someone's butt."

"You have a responsibility to this city to find the most qualified individual," Turner said. "And just looking in the county of El Paso, you're just walking away from your duties."

Back to the drawing board

When Leeser pulled his item from the agenda, he indicated that he would rework the proposal to possibly present to City Council in the coming weeks.

However, it's unclear exactly when the new plan might be introduced or what it might include.

For now, the city is no closer to having a full-time city manager candidate than when it first discussed the search process early last year.

With Interim City Manager Cary Westin stepping back as a candidate for the city's top administrative post, Leeser opined that the door was open for a local qualified candidate who might have stepped aside had Westin expressed an interest in taking the post permanently.

City Chief Human Resources Officer Mary Wiggins reported during the meeting that, under Leeser's plan, the city would likely be able to make an offer for the city manager position within 90 days.

A national search, she said, would take about six months. But with no plan on how the search would unfold or where the pool of candidates might come from, it will likely be much longer than six months before the city has another chief administrator.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: El Paso City Council currently has no plan to find next city manager